http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
THE HOLOCAUST DOMINATED the moral imagination of the 20th century. Before
the rise of Hitler, anti-Semitism was a parochial concern of the Jews; after
the war it was everyone's concern, and everyone regarded it with horror.
The cause of anti-Semitism is a mystery to most Jews and most Gentiles.
One school of thought, wrongly, I believe, blames anti-Semitism on
Christianity itself.

Certainly many Christians have accused the Jews of denying that they have
been superseded--to most the difference in doctrine is not enough to explain the
virulence of anti-Semitism. Another kind of anti Semitism is more subtle and
only a century or two old.

Rebecca West described it in her travels through pre-World War II Yugoslavia:
"Now I understand some other cause for anti-Semitism; many primitive
peoples must received their first indication of the toxic quality of thought
from Jews. They know only the fortifying idea of religion; they see in Jews
the effect of the tormenting and disintegrating ideas of skepticism." This
feeling is shared by those who saw the Jews behind such forces as Bolshevism
and "progressive" movements of all kinds: A supposed Jewish "weakness for
communism" was observed by such genial anti-Semites as Greggor von Rezzori,
villains like Hitler, and, in his interesting new book on the Vietnam War
just published, by the well-liked young American liberal Michael Lind.

But a new kind of anti-semitism may emerge in the 21st century, in reaction
to the attempt to make "the Holocaust" central to our civilization. The
explosion of "the joy of sex in the death camp" movies, the proliferation of
Holocaust memorials and museums, the emergence of a new academic discipline
detached from history called Holocaust and Genocide Studies --- all these
threaten to undermine a proper understanding of the Nazi war against the
Jews. More disturblingly, however, it is igniting resentment against what is
seen as moral and political posturing on the part of some Jews.

The National Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., is the perfect
example of what happens when the attempt to understand the Holocaust breaks
free of the historical discipline and is raised in a hothouse of preening
modish concern; when it becomes "Holocaustology."

Now one of the most
popular tourist destinations in town, the museum has become a political
circus. The sacred mission of memorializing the victims and blaming their
killers has been surrounded by an aura of careerism and self-importance. The
Museum's "Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies" is staging a conference this
week in Washington on the direction of Holocaust studies in the 21st century
in which papers on historiagraphy, art looting, and the various national
varieties of extermination are joined by a paper on "careers for newly
trained holocaust scholars." Its summary roundtable includes such scholars as
John Roth, who was denied the chairmanship of the museum only when several
op-ed pieces he had published came to light, in which compared Reagan to
Hitler and the Israeli military operations in Lebanon to the Nazi death
camps.

Another participant is Professor Atina Grossman, of Cooper Union, who
gives talks comparing the sufferings of the German civilians in the aftermath
of WWII to those of the inmates of the death camps. Before an audience of
holocaust survivors she has lamented that while German civilians suffered a
high incidence of infant mortality, the Jewish women who had survived the
death camps were experiencing an abnormally high birth rate, even though they
were unprepared for motherhood and domesticity and often quite neurotic.

The Museum's former Director of Education, Joan Ringelheim, was exposed by
Gabriel Schoenfeld, together with other feminist Holocaust scholars, in a
brilliant article in Commentary (June 1998). She "has gone so far as to draw
a connection between Nazi "sexism" and the, to her, age-old "exploitation" of
Jewish women by . . . Jewish men. In this very link, indeed, Ringelheim has
located a key to the puzzle of why "malestream" scholarship has allegedly
erased the history of women in the Holocaust. After all, she writes, many
people today simply find it "too difficult to contemplate the extent to which
. . . the sexism of Nazi ideology and the sexism of the Jewish community met
in a tragic and involuntary alliance."

In the world of Ms Ringelheim, the Holocaust becomes a means to other ends.
It's important for Holocaustology to show, for example, that the Nazis were
sexists as well as butchers; that the extermination of the Jews has to be put
in historical context with other persecutions; that persons of color and
members of the working class lived in Auschwitz-like conditions before and
after the historical Holocaust. More recently, another feminist scholar has
re-examined Anne Frank's diaries and discovered that had Ms. Frank escaped
the crematorium, she might well, with luck, have become a lesbian.

In America, in one "mission statement" after another, universities advertise
their "Holocaust and Genocide Studies" programs as specific remedies for
Holocaust relapse. The University of Minnesota declares that the basic
purpose of Holocaust studies is "to educate people to be sensitive and
vigilant toward behavior with potential for a Holocaust." (as if genocides
lurked around unlit alleys in downtown St. Paul).

A Minnesota instructor,
Lucy Smith, is actively opposed to the role of history in this enterprise.
She wonders, I think rather unfairly, whether "teaching about, for example,
The Night of St. Bartolomy in France, ever prevented any other genocide? If
our purpose in teaching is to prevent such occurrences, then we need to reach
the emotions of the students before teaching them historical facts." As a
way, perhaps, of reaching emotions before worrying about facts, the Web site
of the Minnesota program offers electronic buttons to press for "educational
resources", "visual resources", and the like, in the shape of little ovens
built into a brick chimney, which light up when you press them. Perhaps
this is to sensitize one to the incineration of a cyber-Holocaust-victim.

The success of the Holocaust has terrible consequences. It undermines memory
of the Holocaust, it puts irresistible pressure on other groups to demand
their time in the Holocaust sun: gays, members of the working class, women,
decendents of African slaves. It provokes many traditional anti-Semites
smilingly to deny that it happened at all, or that it was part of a wider war
against civilians of all kinds (and despite their preening, the dry
academicism of the Holocaust boffins can do nothing effective to counter this
odd propaganda).

Steadily focusing on the Holocaust without its historical accidental origins
produces a whole new set of myths --- quite apart from the myth that the
Holocaust did not happen.

But these myths have all become more prevalent not
less as Holocaustology has taken root: That Churchill or Roosevelt or Pope
Pius XII or the American Jewish community could have done something
substantial to rescue the Jews from Hitler, but deliberately declined; that
the second world war was undertaken on behalf of the Jews; that Germany was
occupied and dismembered in order to punish her for her treatment of the Jews
(an idea advanced--horrifyingly-- by Professor Goldhagen of Harvard this
spring), that eternal vigilance against something called fascism will prevent
future holocausts, when in fact one might argue, that genocide - or massacre
of whole classes-only becomes a necessary part of the ideology of class
warfare, and has taken place-and will yet take place-wherever radical
socialist regimes take sway, as in China, Russia, and Cambodia; that the Nazi
holocaust was, far from being the conclusion of an historical inevitability,
as accidental a disaster as has ever befallen the Jewish people; that nothing
like the Nazi holocaust has ever happened before to the Jews.

Again, it is a
sad fact of Jewish history that near-complete extinction of Jewish
communities within greater or lesser areas is a commonplace. That "no G-d
could have permitted Auschwitz" is falsified by the other horrors the Jews
have horribly endured, from almost the beginning of their history, at the
hands of greater powers, most of whom have utterly perished.

Finally, there is the awful end-point of Holocaust studies: In an unintended
imitation of the Nazi butchers, holocaust historians engage in the intimate
examination of the unspeakable lives of Jews in the death camps before they
were butchered as if they were scientists observing gnats or flies. If ever
there was a way to re-dehumanize the victims of the Nazis, this is it. But
such is the logic of the professionalization of "Holocaustology": First
perish, then publish-or-perish.

The Talmud vividly warns that the Torah must not be made merely into an
instrument for something other than itself: "Do not make the Torah a crown
wherewith to magnify thyself, or a spade wherewith to dig." The Holocaust,
which should be held sacred, is in danger of becoming used as such an
instrument.

An American official in Macedonia crowed when Elie Wiesel
visited a refugee camp during the Nato bombing campaign, "You need a person
like Wiesel to keep your moral philosophy on track." Well, no, you don't.

Wiesel didn't suffer-and millions of his fellow Jews didn't die--in order
merely to keep anyone's moral philosophy from going off the rails. And if
the Holocaust is subjected to such a feeble purpose, then its point and its
very reality may well in time be forgotten and its victims
mocked.

JWR contributor Sam Schulman is deputy editor of Taki's Top Drawer, appearing in New York
Press, and was formerly publisher of Wigwag and a professor of English at
Boston University. You may contact him by clicking here.